Monthly Archives: March 2014

With the PowerShell script below you can quickly start playing an iTunes playlist.

Preparation steps:
1. buy a device from the dark side (ha ha), install iTunes on your Windows computer
2. buy/import music and organize the tracks in playlists

Usage:
Let’s say you’ve prepared a playlist called ‘Blues Rock till the cow comes home’ in an iTunes library called ‘Mediathek’ and you want it to play in shuffle mode. Open a PowerShell command window and type:

OMG, I haven’t posted anything since June 2013 when I was so enthusiastic about the upcoming DSC feature in PowerShell 4. What happened meanwhile?

Get-Up

In these days I’m feeling that we’re facing a new era in IT Consulting business. Here in Germany, a growing number of companies requests automation solutions. For example, automation is a core requirement in call for bids increasingly. Folks, I think we’re just about to enter the Golden Age of IT Automation. Finally! Automation will be commodity. I am so excited I just can’t hide it.

Get-IntoIt

Why I am so happy? Since the mid-nineties when I’ve entered the IT business I’m an automation guy. I learned to get the most out of batch files, excessively leveraged other scripting languages like VBScript and tools in order to design automation frameworks for several purposes. After I’d changed into the IT consulting business and didn’t lose my affinity for automation. As from 2008, I was part of a team that built a PowerShell-based configuration management framework. With this framework we were able to help huge enterprises to fully automate the installation and configuration of their Citrix farms, for example. It kept hundreds of servers in their defined state. Furthermore it separated the business logic from configuration logic. Thus, it was easy to build and maintain identical environments for Test, UAT, and Prod for example. Pretty similar to Chef or Puppet, but for “the other OS” that is Windows 😉

Get-Involved, Get-Involved, Get-Involved…

And now? Nowadays, the core for such a framework is directly built-in into PowerShell and called Desired State Configuration. This is so cool. Just built your solution around DSC.